The ShoreTel Dock represents a huge leap in business communications technology.
When you’re a decades old business communications company – you’ve seen a lot of change, to say the least.
Ten years ago, VoIP phone systems were still in their infancy, unified communications (UC) was barely more than AOL Instant Messenger, and eleven-year-olds didn’t have cell phones. When you stop and think about it, a lot has changed since 2003.
Today, ShoreTel blogged about a discussion it had with telecom consultants about what we can expect the next few years to look like in the business communications sphere.
Here’s a preview of what they had to say:
1) Better Client Understanding
“Five years ago, folks didn’t think they needed unified communications,” says James O’Gorman, Principal of Communications Engineering. “But today there’s a trend toward better understanding of the technical elements like chat, web and IM. People understand it and can see the benefits.” O’Gorman cites the client education work done by vendors, partners and consultants over recent years as the source for this rising tide of solution awareness.
2) Better Desktop Integration
Ernie Holling, president and chief strategist of InTech, calls the trend toward better UC feature integration the “evolution of a toolset.” J.R. Simmons, president and principal consultant of COMgroup, comments, “Everyone is going unified messaging. Hot buttons are desktop sharing, click to communicate and integration between IM and phone functions. Clients are excited about new desktop tools with a single interface, with drag and drop and type and click ease.” And he shares a personal comment, citing ShoreTel as being “ahead of the curve, because the desktop integration has been better than others going back further.”
3) Mobility X 3
“The hot topic trend I’m seeing is mobility, mobility, mobility,” says Chris Thalassinos of Toronto’s Communications Intelligence Group. O’Gorman agrees, saying, “It’s hard to overstate the need for mobility, because now the mobile platform can have full UC capability.” Melissa Swartz, Founder of Kansas City-based Swartz Consulting, cites the proliferation of mobile devices as a trend that’s not slowing as employees bring their favorite personal smartphones and tablets to work. “BYOD as a topic is a strategy, not a technology,” continues Thalassinos, who says if employees disagree with a company’s mobile device policy they’ll simply turn the tools off. “It ties everything from HR to IT, but it has to be right for the organization.”
4) Contact Center Proliferation
Swartz sees call and contact center components included in more and more UC deployments. “It might just be for an internal help desk, but deploying tiny contact centers within an organization offers features like estimated wait time for calls, call queuing, skills-based routing, call recording, and reporting,” she says. Byron Battles, Principal of The Battles Group, agrees, citing the value of contact center metrics to internal operations.
5) Video?
“On the horizon, one of the things you read about is video,” says Simmons. “They say it’s a trend, but we see slow adoption. Does video truly enhance a conference call? It helps the presenter but can restrict the participants — someone is eating lunch, or checking their Blackberry,” he says. He cites video’s ability to enhance specific situations like a long-distance job interview, but questions its impact for generic calls and teleconferences. Swartz does see a trend toward video, “but not for every user,” she says. “But I think every organization — if they’re not buying video today, they’re buying a position for it in the future.”
Read more about the future of business communications by clicking here.